CAD software applications provide users with the capability to create and edit geometry, models and drawings using actions or commands. Historically, these actions were launched from menus and toolbar buttons or command prompts which were placed at static locations on the screen. As a result, these actions were not always handy, i.e. near the present location of the cursor.
To address that, most CAD software applications like AutoCAD, Inventor, Solidworks, Spaceclaim, etc, and BricsCAD now provide a set of tools, hereby referred to as a ‘context menu’, that pops up near the cursor thereby reducing the time taken to access the commands.
This context menu typically can be invoked either by explicit user action like a right click, or by the software calculating if there is an entity of interest under the cursor and automatically invoking it.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 6,614,458B1 discloses a computer aided design method for mechanical design software application.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 8,136,045B2 discloses a method for managing menus associated with a graphical user interface that is displayed on a display unit.
Problem with these methods is to present a limited set of choices since all possible actions cannot be presented in that context menu. Typically these sets of choices are filtered in a rudimentary fashion depending on the type of entity/subentity that the cursor is being hovered on, and by the phase of modeling the user is in, which could be sketching, part modeling or assembly modeling.
Due to this rudimentary filtering, the set of options that get present are often generic or irrelevant, because the list of possible actions does not only depend on the single entity type or even the context.
There is a need for a CAD model manipulating method which provides more relevant possible user actions and which increases productivity by reducing time for a user to manipulate entities or subentities of a CAD model.